A Temporary Fix
by Lucinda M. H. Cheshir
Summary: Elsie Gianni had long been a fan of One Piece, but that didn't mean that she wanted to be a part of it!
1. Chapter 1

Elsie Gianni never enjoyed having to go grocery shopping on her own, but with a wad of her mother's cash in her purse, her phone turned up to max volume to be notified as soon as her wonderful boyfriend Lazlo texted her with the wonderful sound of a One Piece den-den-mushi, wearing an adorable black converse dress and her favourite pair of cherry-red high tops, Elsie didn't actually mind walking the three blocks down to Martin's for some emergency groceries. Even if it did mean that she'd have less time to watch episodes of her favourite anime ever: One Piece. Not that she'd been really watching it much lately anyway: what with her senior year of high school looming before her as well as college and the novelty of having her first-ever boyfriend, Elsie had been keeping fairly busy, too busy really to do anything more than read the weekly installments of the various mangas that she kept up-to-date with, the most prominent of which was, of course, One Piece.

But overall, Elsie was basically over the whole anime/manga phase, and since she'd even gone so far as to quit her job at the library to deal with all this schoolwork and college and boyfriend business.

"_Bda bda bda... bda bda bda... bda bda bda... bda bda- katcha._" Her phone sounded from the depths of her purse, and Elsie smiled. Den-den-mushi were the best, she decided, and, after looking both ways and walking quickly across the street to Martin's, she took her phone out of her purse and checked it. It wasn't from Lazlo, unfortunately, but almost as welcome as it: it was a text from Elsie's best friend Aida. Elsie unlocked her phone and replied to the text quickly: she needed to get the emergency stash of groceries quickly if she was going to get home in time for her mother to make delicious baked pasta for supper. Plus Elsie was really having a craving for some Starbucks and some thumbprint cookies.

_Aida: Have you finished the history assignment yet?_

_Elsie: Not yet... going to Martin's to get stuff for dinner. Haven't even looked at the stupid book yet, lol._

Elsie hurried into the supermarket and looked at the list her mother had given her: penne pasta, Paul Newman's tomato basil pasta sauce, Italian sausage, and pre-shredded mozzarella and provolone cheese. Easy enough, and her mother had definitely given her more money than necessary to buy just that. So thumbprint cookies and a Starbucks frappuccino were not out of the question. And failing that, there was always Elsie's own funds in the form of her credit card, but she didn't think that she would have to resort to using that.

In less than twenty minutes, Elsie was headed back out of the Martin's with a single plastic grocery bag suspended by its handles from the crook of her right arm while in her right hand she held a most delicious grande-sized strawberry frappuccino. Sipping it, she looked both ways and began to step into the street when she heard the familiar

"_Bda bda bda... bda bda bda... bda bda bda... bda bda- katcha._" Coming from her purse. Elsie smiled and blindly felt around in the bag. Maybe this time it would be a text from Lazlo. That would be very nice: since getting him to finally agree to be her boyfriend, Elsie's thoughts seemed to be running on rather a monopoly of fluffy thoughts about Lazlo. She tried not to go overboard with her thoughts, but it was so darn hard to do that whenever she saw something that she thought he'd probably enjoy, or the fact that she kept inexplicably remembering how very good he smelled. She knew that she tended to hyper-romanticize things, especially things like this, but what could she expect, brought up reading fairy tales where beautiful princesses always find their true loves and other such similar stories?

When she was about halfway across the street and there were still no cars in sight, Elsie finally found her phone and pulled it out, looking down at it and smiling. It was from Lazlo. Finally he'd stopped playing videogames and/or watching Netflix long enough to reply to her (very clever) earlier text. She hoped that he'd found her joke about hobbits hysterical, but it was always so draining trying to sound clever with each new text. At least Lazlo always knew what she meant, even when she sounded vaguely stupid. He understood what it was like to be a disorganized writer with hundreds of (very noisy) little people living in his head and demanding attention. Honestly, characters were so high-maintenance.

Her phone buzzed again and the den-den-mushi made its familiar call. Lazlo had sent her another message! Wondering what she had done to deserve such good fortune, Elsie began to unlock her phone to see what it was he was texting her about. She didn't even realize that she had stopped in the middle of the street. Or that the lights had changed. Or that a large pickup truck was headed straight for her at a good twenty miles per hour...

But she most certainly noticed it when it hit her.

First the sharp shove came, then the impact with the asphalt. After a few stunned milliseconds, pain flooded Elsie's nervous system and her vision spun and began to fade. She could hear the screeching of brakes and panicked shouting, but it didn't really register with her what was actually happening. All she could think was _I hope that the cookies are okay. And my Starbucks._ And then her world went black.

**_Author's Notes: Ah, yes, the dreaded Mary Sue. Actually, I really hope not: but we shall see, now won't we? Anyway, this is just a stab I'm taking at writing something semi-realistic... This little universe of Elsie's is actually helping me deal with some of my real life crap, and as I hope you'll realize from reading this first chapter, there's absolutely no way that this will all take place in the One Piece world. However, some of it will. On another note, I'm not exactly sure how long this will end up, but I'm thinking that it will be pretty short, as far as the number of chapters goes._**

**_Peace out,_**

**_~Lucinda_**


	2. Chapter 2

Zoro was the first to notice the foreign objects that were falling from the sky, but this was only because one of them landed on his stomach as he was taking his customary afternoon nap.

The glass jar hurtled out of the clear blue sky at what was likely terminal velocity and landed squarely on Zoro's green haramaki before bouncing harmlessly off onto the grassy deck of the _Thousand Sunny_ and rolling for a few inches before coming to a stop.

Zoro grunted as the jar made impact and his good eye snapped open. _Are we under attack?_ Was Zoro's immediate thought, though upon spying the projectile, he scowled. _Tomato sauce._ It was probably the work of that damn curly-brow cook. So he was throwing perfectly innocent jars of sauce at Zoro now, hm? Zoro wouldn't put it past his rival to do that.

...But the more he actually thought about it, the more Zoro realized that this wasn't the cook's style. First and foremost, it was against the shitty cook's moral code to use food like this: it would probably be akin to the idea of him throwing one of the female members of the crew at Zoro, though probably a slightly less severe transgression. Second, it simply wasn't the cook's style to attack Zoro in his sleep. It wouldn't prove anything if he were to beat Zoro like that.

So where had the jar come from?

"Hey, what's this box?" Usopp's voice filtered over from across the deck, from where he was fishing with Luffy, Chopper, and Brook.

"It looks like food!" Luffy exclaimed, pouncing on the blue cardboard box and shaking it, rattling the contents.

Zoro stood, and, scooping up the jar of red sauce, strode over to his captain. "I found some, too." He announced, holding the jar for Luffy to see.

"Wow! It must be my lucky day!" Luffy laughed, snatching the jar from Zoro's hands before he could protest.

"Where is it coming from?" Usopp asked wonderingly. "Look, there's something else." He walked over to the object and picked it up. "Italian Sausage," he read the label wonderingly.

"Luffy-san, Zoro-san, Usopp-san, don't look now, but I think I see more strange objects falling from the sky." Brook interjected, pointing upwards at a few black specks far above the _Sunny_ with one skeletal finger. "Though I have no eyes to see! Yohohoho! Skull joke!"

"You're right." Zoro said, ignoring his fellow swordsman's ridiculous (and not very funny, in Zoro's opinion,) joke.

"IT'S RAINING FOOD!" Luffy shouted joyously at top volume. "THE NEW WORLD IS SO AWESOME!"

"Somehow I don't think that's the case." Usopp said.

"What do you think it is, Usopp?" Chopper asked, abandoning his fishing rod as well to join the conversation.

Usopp squinted up at the specks in the sky, trying to think up a possible explanation. Then he noticed something. "Hm?" he pulled his sniper goggles up to his eyes to get a better look.

"Oi, losers! Caught anything yet?" Sanji poked his head out of the kitchen to yell at the four who were supposed to be fishing for dinner. Seeing them all on the deck, plus the idiot marimo swordsman, Sanji couldn't help but be irritated. "What the hell are you idiots doing?!" He shouted, and swung over the railing to join the five on deck and give them a good kicking, including the marimo, who was doubtless the instigator of this flagrant laziness.

"I think that's... a girl... falling from the sky..." Usopp said, in awed disbelief, and that was all it took for Sanji to completely forget about kicking some sense into those five as he looked up into the sky as well.

"Holy shit, the sniper's actually telling the truth! There is a lady up there!" Sanji was shocked at this development, but not too shocked to project the path in which the mysterious falling girl was falling. It wasn't good.

"She's going to fall into the sea!" Usopp yelled, apparently thinking along the same lines as Sanji.

"Do you think this is her food, Luffy-san?" Brook asked, apparently ignoring the disaster that was at hand.

"Maybe if it is she'll share it with me!" Luffy said cheerfully.

"If she survives the fall." Zoro pointed out. Sanji scoffed. While those three were busy having a calm discussion, a lady was about to die a horrible death! Well, not if Sanji had anything to say about it. He hadn't spent two horrible years in Hell just to let an innocent lady plunge to her death in the cold, unforgiving depths of the New World waters.

"Sky walk!" he shouted, and launched off of the deck, running as quickly as he could through the air, up to the ever-nearing figure until...

Sanji caught the girl neatly in his arms, slipping down several yards before regaining his balance and stopping himself so that he hung in the air. He was immediately rewarded for his chivalry by getting a strange pinkish and extremely cold drink spilled all over his head as it sped downwards. But he didn't mind: he was also being rewarded with a vision of loveliness. Well, more or less. Certainly, she wasn't nearly the beauty that Sanji's beloved Nami-san and Robin-chan were, but the girl he had saved wasn't bad looking either. Her wavy dark brown hair spilled in unruly curls over her face, loose strands escaping from the twin braids she wore tucked behind her ears. A pair of fragile-looking rectangular glasses were perched on the girl's nose, and behind them, her eyes were closed, as though she was sleeping peacefully. Odd jewelry clinked together at the girl's neck, and her short black dress ruffled in the breeze that made the girl shiver in her sleep. Aware of her discomfort, Sanji hugged the lady closer to him, willing that his warmth would keep her not quite slight enough to be called slight form from shivering again as he walked back down to the deck.

"Nice work, Sanji!" Luffy yelled, grinning and stretching his arms out above him, the blue box of pasta in one hand and the jar of tomato basil sauce in the other. "Now we can ask her to share her food with us!"

"I think a better question to ask her is why she was falling from the sky." Zoro pointed out as they watched Sanji alight on the grassy deck and carefully lay the strange girl down.

Chopper took one look at her before he began to screech for a doctor, momentarily forgetting that that was his own job.

He was fairly justified in this reaction: after all, the left side of the girl's face was a bloodied mess, along with her left arm, though the wounds seemed to be mostly superficial scrapes. However, dark purple, very serious looking bruises had blossomed on both arms, and were probably the result of some sort of large object crashing into the girl at high speed.

"Doctor! We need a doctor!" Chopper shrieked in panic.

Sanji kicked him lightly in order to get him to stop hyperventilating. "That's you, Chopper. Get to work." He frowned at the girl who lay unconscious on the _Sunny's_ deck. Just a moment before, he could have sworn that her face had been angelic and completely unmarred by any of the injuries that now covered it.

"Oh! Yeah!" Chopper recollected his wits and pulled his medicine bag off of his tiny shoulders. "Let's see... These should stop the bleeding, and this will be good for the pain..." He mumbled to himself, then turned to the rest. "Would one of you go and get some bandages out of the infirmary?"

Sanji sprang to attention. "Wait just a moment, Chopper and I'll be back with the bandages you need to help this lady!" He promptly dashed off to belowdecks.

"What's all that noise?" came a feminine voice rather harshly from the mikan deck where she and the other female member of the crew had been tending to their plants.

"Some girl fell from the sky!" Luffy looked up at Nami and Robin, looking curiously down at them from over the railing, and grinned.

"From the sky?" Robin repeated, and Nami looked upwards.

"I didn't notice any sky islands floating by. Are you guys sure of this?" she said dubiously.

"The love-cook had to use that 'sky-walk' thing of his to run up and catch her. Didn't you notice?" Zoro said infuriatingly. Nami scowled at him.

"Excuse me for not noticing every little thing you boys do down there when I'm trying to have a decent conversation with Robin." She snapped back.

"Whoa, these glasses sure are weird!" Luffy grinned obliviously, temporarily abandoning the mysterious food and snatching the glasses off of the unconscious girl's face and placing them on his own nose. "Everything's all blurry! I wonder how she can see anything with these on!"

"Luffy, that's probably not the best idea-" Usopp began as Luffy began hopping around rather drunkenly, his world distorted by the strong prescription lenses.

"Hey, Usopp! You're a big blob! You look funny!" Luffy grinned, then turned to his musician. "And Brook! You're a big blob, too!" the captain laughed.

"Luffy put those glasses down before you break them!" Nami ordered as she made her way down the stairs. "She probably can't see without them if everything's so blurry for you."

"But I'm having _fun_, Nami!" Luffy whined.

Nami was about to answer firmly that Luffy seemed to have a natural talent for breaking things, when the Sunny lurched suddenly, making a good number of the crew lose their footing, including Luffy, who fell flat on his face.

"Oi, Franky! What's all that about?!" Nami picked herself up off of the lawn deck and turned towards the helm, where the cyborg seemed to be having some difficulty with the wheel.

"Weather change, I think, Nami-sis!" he yelled back. "Get up here!"

"Okay!" Nami called, and spared a glance at the rest of the crew, who were all picking themselves up as well. "Get ready for trouble, everyone." She ordered, and headed up to the helm to help Franky navigate.

"I'm back!" Sanji announced his presence loudly as he burst from the door to belowdecks, arms full of clean white bandages. "What was that lurch about just now?"

"The weather is changing again, Sanji-san." Brook explained readily. "At least, that's what Nami-san and Franky-san told us."

"Thank you, Sanji." Chopper nodded, taking the bandages Sanji had fetched for him, and began expertly wrapping the worst of the mysterious falling girl's wounds. He worked quickly, because Chopper knew that changing weather would likely mean that the seas would be rough and dangerous for a person in a delicate condition, such as this girl. When he had finished the preliminary bandages, Chopper stood slightly away from her and said "Heavy Point!" Immediately, his tiny form grew and shifted into a rather monstrous bipedal creature. "I'll take her to the sick bay and keep an eye on her." Chopper announced, picking his patient up easily and cradling her gently in his arms, so as not to injure her further. "Luffy, she's going to need her glasses when she wakes up, so give them back."

Luffy, who had risen only to his knees, didn't seem to be hearing any of the conversation that was going on around him.

"Oi, Luffy, what is it?" Zoro asked, sensing something was wrong.

Luffy looked up, his expression horrified, and wordlessly held up the mangled pair of glasses.

"Luffy you idiot!" Sanji screeched immediately, kicking his captain on his rubber head with full force. "How could you break her glasses?!"

"I d-didn't mean to!" Luffy blubbered, eyes and nose running. "Oi, Usopp, can you fix them?" Luffy turned to the mechanically minded sniper and offered him the pieces of the broken glasses.

Usopp took them and inspected them pragmatically. "Maybe. It's going to take some time- WHICH WE DON'T HAVE RIGHT NOW BECAUSE THE SEA'S CHANGING! PAY ATTENTION, LUFFY!"

"Yosh! I owe you one, Usopp!" Luffy nodded, his tears stemming themselves a little too easily.

Chopper rolled his eyes and headed as quickly as he dared towards his infirmary.

"Hey everybody, brace yourselves!" Nami yelled from the helm.


End file.
